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Windows 7 Sucks

When you’re at work everybody knows that your home directory, or home drive, is located on a server somewhere safe. It’s backed up, and it isn’t something that is on your local PC. Why can’t the same paradigm apply at home?

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to setup one of my desktop PCs as a home directory file server. Setting up a PC as a network share is easy enough; and it is pretty easy to share between other Windows 7 PCs (Just don’t try to mix in XP PCs! Danger!) But the location of the users’ home directory is fixed locally in the world of Windows, or at least it is when you’re not using Windows Server.

This is rather frustrating trying to manage my home network of 4 users and a bunch of PCs. The only user that cares about this is my wife, who actually does work on the computers, unlike the kids. She would like to have a place to store her files. To get around this, I’ve created a folder for her which links to a network share. All she has to do is click on it from any PC in the house. What I would really like is for her to automatically have her home directory and desktop look the same no matter where she logs in.